"the rise of the share of upper wages within
total income appears as new trend of crucial importance. In the United
States, no overall decline of the share of wages is observed. Thus the
rising share of upper wages mirrors the distinct dynamics of this
category of wages (not exclusively very high wages). It is not possible
to approach these trends in terms of fractions of surplus-value and
value of the labor power, considering all wages globally. The bipolar
approach no longer matches the features of contemporary capitalism.
Three components must be distinguished: (1) profits, whose share in
total income grew; (2) upper wages, whose share also increased; and (3)
the wages of the great mass of wage-earners, whose share diminished.
Marxism can only gain from such an updating of its social framework." (http://www.jourdan.ens.fr/levy/dle2011d.htm)

"this series fluctuating around 70%, with a weakly discernable decline from a peak of 75% in the early 1970s to 69% in 2005. We believe that this measure understates the decline in labor’s share due to the rapid growth of top executive salaries, bonus payments, and stock options in the past 25 years and their treatment as wage and salary income in the NIPA.
These payments go overwhelmingly to corporate executives who occupy a position closer to capital than labor in the social relations of the firm. These managers control the firm’s capital, acting as representatives of its owners, and their compensation is designed to align their interests with the owners. We (perhaps, somewhat arbitrarily)
identify the share of the top 0.5% of wage and salary income as payments to corporate officers on the basis of their ‘proximity to capital.’" (min fetning)

"Top wages may include incomes that should more properly be classed as accruing to capital. We may very broadly say that the Anglo countries have seen a greater rises in inequality and smaller falls in the wage share when compared with Europe (except Denmark) and Japan. It is well known that these are also the countries where the trend towards increasing CEO pay has been the strongest. There are also other differences in their economic systems: a greater reliance on financial markets, more dispersed shareholding, and more lawyers. If one sees
the income of these sectors (which is measured as accruing to the labour share) as being substantially rents extracted from the capital share, one may have a partial explanation: in marginal product terms there should have been a shift from labour to capital everywhere, but in the Anglosphere a large part of this has been captured by capital’s highest paid servants.

A crude way of measuring the possible magnitude of this effect is with a bottom 99% labour share, as is done by Glyn (2009) for the US. Subtracting the top 1% of labour incomes from the wage share gives a more accurate picture of the share of the mass of the workforce in the national product." (min fetning)